by Pearl Cleage
Another pause. Elmer Fudd earned his paycheck by stumbling effortlessly into the trap Bugs had set for him and the Rev finally opened up the door.
He was so drunk he could hardly stand up. His eyes were bloodshot, his lids were at half-mast, and the smell of bourbon was so strong on him that you could get a contact high just standing too close. His tie was twisted around sideways and his shirt looked like he’d slept in it. He staggered toward us, swayed a step, put out his hand and patted Joyce’s shoulder in a move that was meant to be fatherly and reassuring, but wasn’t even close.
“Of course you can’t wait, my sisters. The Lord sent you here for answers, for guidance, and as his servant, I am charged with . . . I am charged with . . .” Seeming to hear the TV for the first time, he turned to Tyrone and frowned. “What are you doing, son? What are you doing?”
Tyrone never took his eyes off the screen. “I’m watching TV. What does it look like I’m doing?”
I had seen Tyrone defy his grandmother in subtle ways, but nothing like this. It was clear who was in charge at Gerry’s house. No wonder the Rev wasn’t seen around much during the week. She probably had all she could do to get him sobered up for Sunday morning.
The Rev looked confused. “Your clothes, son!” His voice was wheedling as if he were trying to convince a cranky two-year-old that it was time for a nap. “Go put some pants on.”
Tyrone stood up and turned off the television. He looked at his grandfather for the first time, stretched to his full height, and made a noise that was a cross between a snicker and a snort.
“Oh,” he said, “now it’s time to put the pants on, huh? Make up your mind, why don’t you?”
His grandfather’s eyes followed him as he swaggered off down the hall with an expression of exasperation and something else I couldn’t identify and decided I didn’t want to. The Rev was too drunk to give us a straight answer about anything, and Tyrone wasn’t about to try. When he slammed the bedroom door behind him, the Rev turned back to us.
“Please,” he said, blowing bourbon in our direction. “Have a seat. I’m sorry about Tyrone. He’s going through one of those . . .” His voice trailed off helplessly. He had no idea what he had started out to say.
“Phases?” Joyce offered.
“Exactly,” said the Rev, smiling and nodding with drunken gratitude. “He’s going through a phase.”
“I think it’s more than that,” Joyce said. “I think he needs professional help.”
The Rev looked confused again, then he smiled like drunks tend to do when they think they’re going to put one over on you.
“Well, then the blessing is, he can get that help from his grandfather who loves him.”
It was real clear to me that this guy was not only drunk, he was delusional. Him helping Tyrone was like Mattie raising Frank. A joke.
Rev leaned toward us like he was speaking confidentially. “I know about our boys.” He nodded and looked around to be sure we were alone. “I know how to guide and direct them away from the path of Satan and into the arms of Christ Jesus.”
I wondered if he even knew about the story Tyrone and Gerry had concocted for the sheriff.
“Reverend Anderson,” Joyce said. “I was hoping you’d be able to be at the meeting at Sheriff Gates’ office yesterday.”
He frowned like he was trying to remember that long ago.
“Sheriff Gates?”
“Your wife was there and . . .”
Suddenly the Rev’s face darkened and he scowled at Joyce like he’d just caught her in a lie, but he couldn’t get hold of exactly what lie it was, so he did what drunks always do: he went left. Through the Jack Daniel’s fog in which he was floating, the mention of his wife held out the first recognizable port in a storm, and like a drowning man, he grabbed it and went for broke.
“My wife,” he said, and his voice trembled with drunken emotion even while his tongue stumbled over the words. “My wife is a living saint. Her spirit is too big for this . . . this place.” He was getting more indignant by the second. “She has looked evil in the eye, unblinking. She has propped me up on every weak and leaning side and it is her voice alone, lifted in praise, that can soften God’s heart toward the lowly sinner!”
He stood and walked unsteadily toward the window. “When the Devil tested me, when he had me in his clutches, breathing his hot breath into my face, my wife reached out and took my hand. Her faith opened the jaws of the beast and pulled me through, praise the Lord!” he said, throwing up his hands and almost losing his balance. He grabbed the arm of the nearest chair and lowered himself carefully into it. His eyes struggled to focus on us, then he smiled and spoke as if offering us the sweetest gift he could find.
“She can pray with you,” he whispered. “The Lord still listens to her voice even though his ears are closed to me.”
I was curious. “Why?” I said. “Why are his ears closed to you?”
He looked at me and shook his head sadly. “I strayed from the path. I was tempted and tested and I failed the Lord. Until I prove myself worthy, my cries will be in vain, although I pray without ceasing.”
I was amazed to see tears running down his face.
“Without ceasing!”
Joyce stood up to go. This was clearly hopeless, but I held up my hand to stop her. He wanted to tell us something and I sure wanted to hear it.
“What did you do,” I said, “to make the Lord so mad?”
His head jerked up and he looked suddenly wary. He wagged a drunken finger at me. “No, no, no,” he said. “She warned me of you! Of both of you! She warned me that when you came, you would not be alone. That a dark messenger would be at your side. But I see his cloven hoof! I smell his awful sweat and hear the roar of his eternal fire, but I hold to my God! I hold fast to my God!”
Then he slipped out of the chair and fell to his knees on the rug, closed his eyes, and began to mumble frantically into his tightly clasped hands. I don’t even think he saw us leaving.
From the room down the hall, I could hear the muffled honk of the Roadrunner and the explosion earmarked for Wil E. Coyote.
• 17
i went over to Mack’s old place to do some painting and it’s not Mack’s old place anymore. It’s something new. Eddie finished all the drywall and inside repairs, so we’re giving everything a couple of coats of basic white. Joyce isn’t sure what she wants it to look like eventually. She’s talking about murals and communal collages and hanging photographs of everybody all over the place, but it changes every day, so Eddie figured we can just put down a basic covering and she can decide later.
When he asked me if I wanted to do some painting, I told him up front that home improvements aren’t really my thing. Even when I moved into an apartment that needed a little touching up around the edges, I’d buy the beer, pick up some chicken wings, and recruit from among my gentlemen friends a few who considered themselves to be handy, as opposed to the ones who leaned toward white linen suits in the summer months and regarded household repairs as a way for some other brother to make a few honest dollars.
I asked one of the ones from column B to help me move once in a moment when money was tight and all the handy guys were otherwise engaged. The brother showed up with a bottle of Dom Perignon, an eighteen-foot U-Haul, and three huge Morehouse students with big shoulders, boundless energy, and the enthusiasm an unexpected couple hundred bucks can bring on Saturday afternoon. Easiest move I ever made.
Another reason I usually don’t do crew is that most men can’t explain a simple task to you without going overboard and becoming obnoxious clones of their half-witted seventh-grade shop teacher. But working with Eddie was different. He got me set up with a half gallon of the whitest paint I’ve ever seen and a new roller, filled the deep end of the shiny new paint pan, and left me to my own devices. He was in the kitchen and since everything was open now, I could see him. Every once in a while he’d smile my way, but mostly he was working the way he did everything, like there
was nothing else he’d rather be doing in this world.
Eddie had a gift for focus. When we made love, I always felt like his mind was on whatever he was doing with me at that very moment, not off somewhere checking the stock reports, or wondering if he could still catch the second half of the game, or even speeding through the preliminaries as quickly as possible so he could get to the main event. Every part was as pleasurable to him as every other part.
That’s why he could drive me crazy rubbing the soles of my feet, or kissing the palms of my hands. At any given moment I felt like all of the energy in his body was in complete connection with all of the energy in mine, physical, mental, emotional, sexual, spiritual. The man knew how to be present.
Sometimes, at first, I used to just lie in his arms and cry afterward. I couldn’t believe how good I felt. He was touching parts of me that I hadn’t even known were there, much less that they were capable of the kind of rolling waves of pure pleasure that were now a regular part of our exchanges. When I tried to explain to him why I was crying, the closest I could come to describing the feeling was just absolute relief that I could finally give somebody all that sweet stuff I’d been saving up for so long.
I didn’t realize I had stopped painting and was staring until I looked up and saw Eddie grinning at me.
“Me, too,” he said.
I knew he was pretty good at reading my mind, but I also knew it was important not to let him get too cocky about it. As close as I am to Eddie, it’s only a short step from mind reading to mind control, and I had no interest in gong there.
“Me, too, what?” I said, testing him.
He put down his paintbrush, walked over to me, laid my roller back in the pan, and kissed me for what felt like about half an hour. He was holding me so tight, I felt like those Hollywood movie girls who always swoon at the end of a close-up kiss from the conquering hero.
By the time we came up for air, I figured he had answered the question to my satisfaction. He must have thought so, too, because now he had a question of his own.
“Ava?” He leaned back to look at me without taking his arms from around my waist.
“Yes?”
“Will you marry me?”
• 18
i was so freaked out when Eddie proposed that I just stuttered something at him about having to be by myself for a minute and headed out the front door back to Joyce’s. I’m sure he was surprised, but he didn’t try to stop me. What I really needed was a drink, but I’m so damn pure these days, there isn’t even any damn vodka at the damn house! Maybe I ought to call the Rev. I’ll bet he’s got a taste of something that takes the edges off.
I was walking so fast, I sounded like a bear crashing through the woods. I took the long way because I wasn’t sure if Joyce was home or not, but I knew I needed to calm my ass down before I was ready for people.
I can’t believe it. I’ve been waiting all my life to find what I’ve got with Eddie and when it finally arrives, I’m a walking time bomb. I wanted a life with Eddie so bad it made my bones ache, but what did I have to offer him? A honeymoon full of night sweats? A future full of ugliness and pain and stink?
In the movies, people die of AIDS in a nice clean bed with their family around and a discreet respirator humming softly in the background. In real life, they die with diapers full of bloody diarrhea and purple Kaposi’s lesions on their faces and lungs full of phlegm and bodies full of bedsores. I know fair isn’t in it, but goddam!
I haven’t done flashbacks in ages, but now, suddenly, my mind was clicking through a photo montage of all the men who could have been the one. The nasty one. The infected one. The lying, bisexual one. The intravenous dope fiend one. I wanted somebody to blame besides me. Somebody else to be mad at. Somebody else to hold responsible for the crime of my own stupidity and carelessness.
But there wasn’t anybody to blame. There was just me, wanting time that wasn’t promised, missing moments I hadn’t even lived through yet, turning away from this day because I couldn’t be sure about the next one. I was doing just fine being in the damn moment, being grateful for every sunrise, all that bullshit. But Eddie’s words made me greedy for more. More time. More love. More sweetness. I didn’t want anything to change. I wanted everything to stay just the way it was right now so I could wrap it around me tight enough to keep me from flying into a million scared, screaming pieces.
I have to tell Eddie no. The whole idea is crazy. He’s pretending worse than I am. Hoping that if we stand up together and promise to love each other forever, we can stop time. But we can’t, any more than Joyce can make me all better by running up another pair of blue plaid curtains.
Or maybe it’s worse than that. Maybe he just feels sorry for me. The thought made me feel like I was going to throw up. Maybe he’s prepared to help Joyce take care of me when things get really bad and he figured being married to me might make it easier. Or maybe he just wanted to make sure I didn’t go to my grave an unmarried woman.
This is making me crazy! I never should have come here for the whole summer. I should have stopped by, made Joyce pack up, and headed us both toward San Francisco Bay as fast as we could get there. But I didn’t. I hung around pretending and got caught up in my own daydream. Now it was just going to be that much harder to wake the fuck up and smell the coffee.
• 19
as soon as I saw Mattie step out of that social worker’s car, I knew there was going to be trouble. She had combed her hair and put on what looked like a brand-new pale blue sundress. She was smirking a little like people who aren’t real bright always do when they think they’ve got the jump on somebody smarter.
The social worker was the same sister who brought Imani to us that first day. I couldn’t remember her name, but she looked miserable and nervous, which was not a good sign. I stepped out on the porch since Imani was asleep in the living room and I didn’t want whatever conversation this was going to be to wake her.
“Ava, right?” The social worker extended her hand like they always do. “I’m Janice Randle, Joyce’s friend from Children’s Services?”
I nodded. “Joyce isn’t here right now.” She was due back any minute, but I wasn’t raised to tell everything I know. Janice glanced at Mattie, who rolled her eyes and looked at her watch like any delay might throw off her schedule.
“I ain’t got all day.”
Janice looked at her own watch. “Do you know when she’ll be back?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “If you have something else she needs to sign, I can make sure she gets it.”
Mattie folded her arms and shifted from one foot to the other. “We gonna have to do this another time,” she said. “I told you, I got someplace I gotta be.”
“All right, all right.” Janice spoke sharply to Mattie, and I realized how nervous she really was. People talk smart to social workers all the time and they’re trained to take it. Whatever was going on clearly was working my girl’s last nerve.
“What’s the problem?” I said, hoping she would tell me the truth, even though legally I was only a bit player.
Janice sighed. “We’ve got a little bit of a situation here,” she said.
“What kind of situation?”
“I’d rather talk to Joyce first before we go into all the details.”
“Suit yourself. I’ll ask her to call you when she gets back,” I said just as Joyce pulled into the yard.
She looked at the three of us, then got out of the car and looked at me for some kind of sign about what was going on.
“Janice says we’ve got a situation to deal with and Mattie says she’s got someplace else to go.” Now she knew everything I knew.
Joyce turned directly to Janice and smiled. “Hey, Jan. A situation? Is it an outside situation or can you come in and sit down?”
“I’m sorry,” Janice said, ushering Mattie in ahead of her. “Of course we can sit down. How’re you doing?”
“Fine,” Joyce said. “How you doing, Mattie?”
“What’s the situation?”
Janice took a deep breath. “The family wants the baby back.”
“Imani?” Joyce’s eyes went black. The tone in her voice sucked the warm air from the room and replaced it with ice. Mattie sat up and looked nervously at the door. Janice extended a hand toward Joyce, but drew it back before she made contact. “What are you talking about?”
“Mattie says she’s ready to take the baby back home now.”
“Back home?”
“Your custody is only temporary, Joyce. You know we talked about this.”
“I filed the papers for permanent custody. They told me there wouldn’t be a problem with it. She’s thriving here and you know it.”
“But she ain’t your kid, is she?” Mattie said, real nasty.
Joyce looked at her and then back to Janice. “Have you been to her house?”
Janice nodded. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t matter?”
“They weren’t denied custody. They were never even accused of being unfit. They chose to give up custody temporarily. They can change their minds anytime they want to.”
Mattie smirked at Joyce. “See? You shouldn’t believe all that bad shit you heard about me, ‘scuse my French. I’m turning my life around.”
“She’s a crack-head,” Joyce said as calm as if she’d just said good morning. “Her brother is a violent, woman-hating hoodlum, and neither one of them has even bothered to come and see Imani since we brought her home. They don’t even know her name.”
“You a lie,” Mattie said. “I’m a call her Frankie. After my baby brother. What you think about that?”
“Jan, you can’t be serious,” Joyce said.
Janice nodded and pulled out some papers, handed them across the table to Joyce, who looked at them and back at her friend.
“Listen, Joyce, they dropped this one on me this morning. It’s wrong. Somebody must have pulled strings to have the order issued that fast. I have to transfer her this afternoon, but we can file papers today and get a hearing first thing next week so she can be returned to—”